Agents of Orange

"What's wrong with a bit of the old ultra-violence? Sometimes a droog needs a good tolchock on the old gulliver, O my brothers." – A Clockwork Orange

This submission, Agents of Orange, uses photo documentation of an improvised art intervention by artists at the 2004 Gwangju Biennale in Korea to bring attention to the victims of dioxin (agent orange) poisoning in Vietnam to an international arena. The intervention occurred during a small soirée hosted by the US Consulate at the biennale while the US simultaneously began redeploying large numbers of troops from the Korean peninsula to Iraq after only a few short months when images of torture of captives at Abu Ghraib in US custody disgusted the world.

Agent orange, and the lawsuit against the US by Vietnam currently within the US Federal Court system, received hardly any press coverage among the major media conglomerates until it was discovered the leader of the Orange Revolution and Ukrainian presidential candidate, Yuschenko, himself, was a victim of agent orange poisoning in an alleged assassination attempt which left him cosmetically, though temporarily, disfigured.

The photo documentation was submitted to the exhibition SurRealpolitik (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) in 2005 and will be the first time images of the intervention are seen outside my personal documentation of the event.